justinguitar - sometimes I love the Internet

Disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with software development.

As I write this from my new iPhone 3g (sorry, I had to gloat) I can't help but realize that 99% of the content on the Internet is complete garbage. Of course that is completely subjective (and does not apply to this blog) but it is rare that I find something online that i feel the need to shout (read "blog") about.

I've owned a guitar for as long as I can remember and been unable to play it for even longer...which is why I am so excited about http://www.justinguitar.com. I am in no way associated with the site nor do I have anything to gain by posting about it. This being said, this site is amazing!! Justin provides lessons in written and YouTube form. The real beauty of the site is most definitely his gift for teaching. Lessons are provided in both guitar theory and (user requested) songs. Video lessons are extremely clear with closeups of both the chord and strumming patterns. Lessons are perfectly detailed yet extremely accessible - even for a novice such as myself.

There is a fine balance between teaching songs and teaching how to play guitar - while Justin pushes students to go and figure out chords and strumming patterns by themselves, he definitely appears appreciative of the motivational influence of being able to play a song in the first place - something which his audience appears grateful for (you only have to look as far as the pages and pages (and pages and pages) of song lesson requests on his forum to see what i mean.

An active community is already present in his forums, providing further help to those who seek knowledge. Donations are accepted, but never pushed, making the site available to those who cannot afford lessons and allowing others to say a much deserved 'thank you'.

This is an invaluable site for anyone interested in picking up a guitar and one which i hope continues to grow and grow. Spread the word!!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excel - Adding an existing Pivot table to the data model

Image
  I've been working more with, and continue to be amazed by, Power Pivot. I recently ran into an issue where I needed to add the data for an existing Power Pivot report to the Data Model. There is a checkbox that makes this easy when creating a PivotTable: As so often happens, the analysis grew in scope/importance and I found myself needing to add the data to the data model. While it's not obvious how, there is a way to add an existing Pivot table to the data model. There's a More Tables... link in the PivotTable Fields pane.  Clicking on the  More Tables... results in a dialog confirming that you want to Create a New PivotTable .  Doing so will result in the creation of the new PivotTable in a new sheet. By default the data is added to the data model. You'll likely lose some formatting but for anything other than a trivial PivotTable, this should save effort, as it did for me.
Read more

Getting Started with Mirth (Part 1)

Image
This is the first post in a 2 part series. The second post is here Recently I posted about my positive experience when using Mirth by Webreach as an open source communication layer between one of our in-house applications and a third party and proprietary web service interface. That post received a large amount of attention (relative to my other posts :o) ) so now I will post a quickstart guide to creating a similar setup. In this post I will go over the very basics of using Mirth (please dig in and play around with some more advanced options/configurations), specifically I will demonstrate how to use Mirth to read data from a database, package the data up in a SOAP envelope, send the data to a web service and process the SOAP response. I'll also show you how easy it is to monitor channels once deployed. Once you've installed and opened Mirth for the first time you'll be presented with an empty dashboard - but it wont stay empty for long. This is where you'll s...
Read more

Mirth

Image
Introduction Let's talk about Mirth. At it's simplest, Mirth  link is an Open Source HL7 interface engine. HL7 (Health Level 7) is an NPO involved in the development of healthcare standards and the HL7 v2.x and HL7 v3 standards are commonly used in Medical Information for data interchange - including but not limited to clinical, financial, logistical and administrative messaging. I first ran across Mirth over a year ago on a personal quest to find an alternative to our client's legacy HL7 application. Academically, I wrote a number of lexical analysis tools using lexx, yacc, bison and JavaCC and knew the challenges of writing and maintaining complex parsers. I was simply looking for something that could parse HL7 for us, and perhaps log messages and provide a little more transparency than our application currently allowed.  A year later and our legacy application is still going strong (read: my proposal was declined), but Mirth is being used in production, far away from th...
Read more